The Raspberry Pi is a dirt cheap mini-computer with a Broadcom BCM2835 700 MHz ARM11 with Broadcom VideoCore graphics. A basic model with 2 USB ports, HDMI and Ethernet sells for about $35, and the developers plan to offer an even cheaper $25 model without Ethernet soon. While the processor isn’t very powerful, the Broadcom […]
open source
Posted inFeatured, News
LibreOffice coming to Android… here’s what it looks like so far
LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite for Linux, Mac, and Windows computers. Now the software, which is one of the most popular alternatives to Microsoft Office, is on its way to Android. Late last year the LibreOffice team announced an Android version was in the works. While it’s still very much a […]
Posted inFeatured, News
Old HP TouchPad learns new tricks with webOS Community Edition
The HP TouchPad tablet and Pre and Veer phones were the last devices to ship with HP’s webOS software. So when HP canceled those products last year, it’s no surprise that the pace of development for webOS slowed to a crawl. Sure, HP released a couple of software patches, and a handful of developers released […]
Posted inFeatured, News
HP releases webOS Community Edition, Open webOS still on the way
As promised, HP has released much of the source code for webOS 3.0.5 — the operating system that shipped with the HP TouchPad Tablet last year. HP is calling this webOS Community Edition, and the goal is to make it easier for third party developers to tweak, improve, and write apps for the TouchPad and […]
Posted inFeatured, News
What a little Moonlight can’t do: Open source Silverlight clone is dead
Moonlight is a open source version of Microsoft Silverlight platform… from the same folks that brought us Mono, an open source version of Microsoft’s .NET platform. But while Mono is still under active development, the founder of the project has confirmed that Moonlight is essentially dead in the water. Silverlight is a web technology similar […]
Posted inFeatured, News
ZaTab: ZaReason launches a $349 Android tablet
Linux computer builder ZaReason is now selling its first tablet. But while all of the company’s laptop and desktop computers are sold with Ubuntu Linux, the ZaTab is an Android tablet. The good news for folks who like to tinker is that ZaReason sells the tablet with the bootloader unlocked which means that the tablet can […]
Posted inNews
GIMP 2.8 released (image editor for Linux, Mac, Windows)
GIMP is an open source, powerful image editing application that’s often compared with Adobe Photoshop — although long-time Photoshop users may find GIMP to be less user friendly and less capable in some ways. But for basic image editing tasks (which about all I’m capable of performing), GIMP pretty much blows away the competition. And […]
Posted inFeatured, News
Open source driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics under development
ARM-based chips are all the rage these days in tablets, smartphones, set-top-boxes, and other low power computing devices. But while many of the latest chips can support HD video, 3D graphics, and other high-performance graphics, you generally need to use supported software to get all the benefits — because chip makers don’t offer open source […]
Posted inFeatured, News
Vivaldi open source tablet launch pushed back a month
The Vivaldi tablet is a 7 inch tablet with an 800 x 480 pixel display, a 1 GHz AMlogic processor, and Mer Linux operating system with the KDE Plasma Active user environment. It was expected to ship in May, but developer Aaron Seigo says the date has been pushed back by about a month. A […]
Posted inFeatured, News
Talking Spark tablets with KDE developer Aaron Seigo (video)
The Spark tablet will be the first 7 inch tablet to ship with Mer Linux and KDE Plasma Active software when it launches in May. It’s already available for pre-order in Europe for €200, and developer Aaron Seigo who started the project says when it goes on sale in the US the Spark tablet will likely be […]